Puyo Puyo DA! featuring Ellena System
ぷよぷよDA! -featuring ELLENA system-, aka “Puyo Puyo Da!”
Puyo Puyo Da! featuring Ellena System is a Puyo Puyo dancing game created in 1999 for Arcade and Dreamcast. The game was released only in Japan. It is an adaptation of one of developer Compile’s Disc Station games, Broadway Legend Ellena. It was developed by the now-defunct Compile (which is the company’s last Puyo Puyo game to be released on the Sega system as the company racked up 7.5 million JPY (around 57 million USD) in debt, Compile later sold the series to Sega in 1998 before going into bankruptcy in 2003).
Arle Nadja and her friends take some time off from Puyo fighting and challenge players to dance with them. The game features several dance stages, similar to games such as Space Channel 5 and PaRappa the Rapper. It also introduces a new ELLENA system used to render the game as well as a new exclusive character featuring the same name (Ellena Stevens, the protagonist of the original Broadway Legend Ellena). One or two players can dance to a variety of J-pop tunes by using the controller buttons to copy their opponent’s moves. Based on how well a player copies the moves, Nuisance Puyos are sent to their opponent. The player loses if their health bar drops to 0 or if they have Nuisance Puyos on their side of the screen.
Characters
The characters now wear urban clothes in the video game instead of their usual clothes.
Arle Nadja wears a gray beanie, a red, black, and yellow hoodie, black baggy track pants with white racing stripes on the sides, a chain attached to her track pants, and Adidas Superstar-inspired sneakers.
Ellena Stevens is the star of the game Puyo Puyo DA! is based on.
Suketoudara wears a ballet-inspired outfit, including a tutu and ballet shoes.
Schezo Wegey wears a flamenco-styled outfit and carries a pair of maracas.
Rulue wears a crop tank top, a crop jacket, a skirt, and boots. This outfit is entirely black (and also the first and only time that she ties her blue hair in a ponytail and is not clad in her trademark white and blue dress, bracelets, anklets, and sandals).
Satan (Dark Prince in the later English localizations) wears a black mesh tank top, black jeans, dress shoes, and a pair of glasses. He also has ear piercings.
Minotauros wears a yellow hoodie, sunglasses, jeans, and red and white Adidas Superstar-inspired sneakers. He doesn’t appear in Puyo Puyo Tetris.
Skeleton T has a green beanie, gray and white Nike Air Jordan-inspired sneakers, and fingerless gloves. He doesn’t appear in Puyo Puyo Tetris.
Unlike other Puyo Puyo games, this one met with mainly negative reviews. For some reason, I never played that game, nor downloaded it from a ROM site (before Nintendo shut down waves of ROM sites), nor burned it to put it into a Dreamcast game.
This was originally posted on Medium on April 8, 2019.